Don't Worry, Be Happy (and Honestly Older)

"Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth. Age is assessed not by what it is, but by what it is not." When I read this the other day, written in 1993 by Betty Friedan in her extraordinary book, The Fountain of Age, I realized that even as we 77 million boomers are now clearly in our "middle" years, the pressure to be and look youthful has gotten even more ferocious since Friedan made her observation.

An Avon Global Women’s Survey discovered that 80 percent of women ages 15 to 24 – yes, most teenagers - believe that they are already experiencing signs of aging. This cannot end well.

If kids are freaking out that they look old, they deny themselves the pleasures of actually being young. And if older people feel driven to appear young, they shut themselves off from essential emotional growth in maturity.

"An accurate, realistic, active identification with one’s own aging – as opposed both to resignation to the stereotype of being 'old' and denial of age changes," according to Freidan, "seems an important key to vital aging, and even longevity."

In The Fountain of Age, Friedan cited the studies of Margaret Clark of the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco to underscore her insight.  Clark found that "those who held most tenaciously to certain values of their youth were the most likely candidates for psychiatric breakdown in age. The self-esteem of the healthy older group seemed linked to 'the fruitfulness of a search for meaning in one’s life in the later years,' as compared to the mentally ill, who were still pursuing the values of their youth.  The healthy group had a broader perspective, which they call by different names: wisdom, maturity, peacefulness, or mellowing."

Dr. Andrew Weil’s take in his book, "Healthy Aging," is similar: "If aging is written into the laws of the universe, then acceptance of it must be a prerequisite for doing it in a graceful way. Yet nonacceptance of aging seems to be the rule in our society, not the exception. A great many people try to deny its reality and progress. Two of the most obvious ways of doing so are the use of cosmetic products and cosmetic surgery."

His ultimate conclusion is that to deny aging is to deny ourselves access to a deeply nourishing experience. "Because aging reminds us of our own mortality, it can be a primary stimulus to spiritual awakening and growth."

And the gerontologist Robert Kastenbaum suggests that "holding onto youth and the denial of age leads to mental and emotional 'stagnation.'"

When all of the experts suggest that our later years are a time for spiritual and emotional growth and that that growth is not only virtuous but actually leads to better physical health, it seems to me that it is time for us boomers to ignore the youth-obsessed marketing that our generation triggered 40 years ago, and to begin embracing the beauty in age.

The Great Animal Orchestra

David Byrne introduced me to Bernie Krause's recordings of the natural world.   As summer begins, turn on "Dawn at Trout Lake," close your eyes, slow your breath, and reconnect with the magic of the natural world.

Here's how Byrne set up the recordings.

"Last month I did a book talk with Bernie Krause at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco. Bernie’s book, The Great Animal Orchestra, is sad but worth checking out. Over recent decades, he and a few others have been releasing beautiful recordings of soundscapes, some of which I played before the concerts St. Vincent and I did recently. This month’s playlist are those recordings. Sometimes people thought there were birds loose in the theaters—though there were also some recordings of a wild boar, possibly from Chernobyl, where Peter Cusackdid some recordings (released as Sounds From Dangerous Places). Lastly, there are a couple recordings made by Chris Watson whose Mexican soundscapes on El Tren Fantasma are lovely in a strange way (but not included here—too industrial sounding)."

Is Stress Killing You?

Six hours ago my neighbor decided to steam-clean the façade of his house using an incredibly loud, dark-gray-fume-spewing generator. It's an otherwise gorgeous summer day, so all of my windows were open. And because in New York City, neighbors are only a few feet away, the machine is actually making the floor of my home office vibrate. The condensing steam soaked through several documents before I could shut the windows. Now I'm stuck in an airless, jack-hammering hell. I'm on deadline for work, I'm leaving town at dawn tomorrow while leaving an older child home alone and in charge. My feelings fluctuate between wanting to strangle the neighbor and wanting to burst into tears. I'm completely, overwhelmingly stressed out.   Maybe this shouldn't come as a surprise.  The Huffington Post says New York is the second most stressful place to live in the country.   After uncovering an old Science section of the New York Times, I've now discovered that my stress is probably speeding me along to an earlier death.

Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, a cell biologist and one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World," has been studying something called telomeres, which are the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes. As Claudia Dreifus of the Times explained it, "Chromosomes carry the genetic information. Telomeres are buffers. They are like the tips of shoelaces. If you lose the tips, the ends start fraying.  Telomerase is an enzyme. In cells, it restores the length of the telomeres when they get worn."

Okay, but what does that have to do with my stress? Dr. Blackburn and a psychologist, Dr. Elissa Epel, designed a study to assess whether psychological stress aged our cells. They studied two groups of women, one with healthy children and one with chronically sick kids. "With the stressed group, we found that the longer the mothers had been caring for their chronically ill child, the less their telomerase and the shorter their telomeres. This was the first time you could clearly see cause and effect from a nongenetic influence. "

Blackburn suggests that this is hard proof of the mind-body connection. Epel and she discovered that the women in the study who had bad lipid profiles and obesity -- measures that indicate cardiovascular disease -- also had reduced telemorase.

So as I was writing this piece I decided to take my current stress into my own hands. I've put earplugs in to drown out the hammering, and I'm leaving now to take a long walk far away from the pollution of the machine.

But Blackburn's research has made it even more clear to me that I need to develop a long-term approach to stress management. I've been meaning to start a meditation practice. Tonight I begin.

If you want to control your stress, here a few easy ideas:

• walk outdoors
• get a pet
• practice mindful breathing
• get a good set of earplugs
• put flowers on your desk at work...
• ...and smell them

James Turrell Creates Experiences of Wordless Thought

“I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it…my work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.”— James Turrell

I've visited three of James Turrell's sculptures:  my first mind-blowing was at the Chichu Art Museum on the island of Naoshima in Japan, the second tucked into a classroom at MoMA PS1, and my third light-bending experience was on the Pomona campus.  "For over half a century, the American artist James Turrell has worked directly with light and space to create artworks that engage viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception. Turrell, an avid pilot who has logged over twelve thousand hours flying, considers the sky as his studio, material and canvas. New Yorker critic Calvin Tompkins writes, 'His work is not about light, or a record of light; it is light — the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form.'

And now Turrell has a radiant website that shares his vision with a wider audience.  I pray I have the chance to visit Roden Crater one day.

"Informed by his training in perceptual psychology and a childhood fascination with light, Turrell began experimenting with light as a medium in southern California in the mid-1960's. The Pasadena Art Museum mounted a one-man show of his Projection Pieces, created with high-intensity projectors and precisely modified spaces, in 1967. Mendota Stoppages, a series of light works created and exhibited in his Santa Monica studio, paired Projection Pieces with structural cuts in the building, creating apertures open to the light outside. These investigations aligning and mixing interior and exterior, formed the groundwork for the open sky spaces found in his later Skyspace, Tunnel and Crater artworks.

Turrell often cites the Parable of Plato’s Cave to introduce the notion that we are living in a reality of our own creation, subject to our human sensory limitations as well as contextual and cultural norms. This is evident in Turrell’s over eighty Skyspaces, chambers with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. The simple act of witnessing the sky from within a Turrell Skyspace, notably at dawn and dusk, reveals how we internally create the colors we see and thus, our perceived reality.

In 1974 Turrell began a monumental project at Roden Crater, an extinct volcano in northern Arizona. Continuing the practice begun in his Ocean Park studio, Turrell has sculpted the dimensions of the crater bowl and cut a series of chambers, tunnels and apertures within the volcano that heighten our sense of the heavens and earth. While Roden Crater is not yet open to the public, Turrell has installed works in twenty-two countries and in fourteen US states that are open to the public or can be viewed by appointment. Agua de Luz, a series of Skyspaces and pools constructed within a pyramid in the Yucatán, and forthcoming projects around the world, from Ras al-Khaimah to Tasmania, integrate many of the principles and features embedded within Roden Crater.

Turrell’s medium is pure light. He says, “My work has no object, no image and no focus. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking. What is important to me is to create an experience of worldless thought.”

One Question For Tory Burch

Tory Burch began her business in 2004 with a small boutique in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood, and since then the brand has grown into a global business with more than 100 freestanding stores, toryburch.com and a presence in more than 1,000 department and specialty stores. She's been recognized with numerous awards, including the CFDA for Accessory Designer of the Year, Glamour’s Women of the Year, Forbes’s Most Powerful Women in the World and Vanity Fair’s International Best-Dressed List. A dedicated philanthropist, Tory launched the Tory Burch Foundation in 2009 to support the economic empowerment of women entrepreneurs and their families in the U.S. Through loans, mentorship and entrepreneurial education, the foundation invests in the success and sustainability of women-owned small businesses.

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

The biggest professional risk I’ve ever taken was starting a business. The concept was for beautifully designed, well-made pieces that didn’t cost a fortune. I had worked in the fashion industry for many years in marketing and PR, but I had never been a designer or a CEO. I had to learn on the job.

I was 36 years old and was taking some time off to be with my three young boys. I began putting together image books—sketches and photographs of my parents whose effortless elegance embodied the concept. I started working out of my apartment with a small team and traveled often to Hong Kong, where we set up a sourcing and production office.

When we needed to raise capital to get the company off the ground, I approached family and friends. It was exciting and stressful at the same time. I told people I only wanted them to invest if they were prepared to lose their money. I was willing to bet on myself but bringing in other people raised the stakes and I didn’t want anyone to be disappointed.

With the capital we raised and a personal investment, we were able to open a retail store and launch our ecommerce site. There were many naysayers, and I didn’t take what they said to heart. It was a challenge but I didn’t second-guess myself. The experience made me realize I was an ambitious person and with that was a willingness to take risks.

Why Do We Hate Certain Words?

A while back, Matthew J.X. Malady wrote about the fascinating phenomenon of word aversion for Slate.  Most of us have words we dislike for emotional reasons -- they sound harsh 

bunk

or connote something gross(ish) 

zit

or 

slug.

"But first, some background is in order.  The phenomenon of word aversion seemingly pedestrian, inoffensive words driving some people up the wall—has garnered increasing attention over the past decade or so. In a recent post onLanguage Log, University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Libermandefined the concept as “a feeling of intense, irrational distaste for the sound or sight of a particular word or phrase, not because its use is regarded as etymologically or logically or grammatically wrong, nor because it’s felt to be over-used or redundant or trendy or non-standard, but simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting.”

So we’re not talking about hating how some people say laxadaisical instead of lackadaisical or wanting to vigorously shake teenagers who can’t avoid using the word like between every other word of a sentence. If you can’t stand the word tax because you dislike paying taxes, that’s something else, too. (When recently asked about whether he harbored any word aversions, Harvard University cognition and education professor Howard Gardner offered upwebinar, noting that these events take too much time to set up, often lack the requisite organization, and usually result in “a singularly unpleasant experience.” All true, of course, but that sort of antipathy is not what word aversion is all about.)

Word aversion is marked by strong reactions triggered by the sound, sight, and sometimes even the thought of certain words, according to Liberman. “Not to the things that they refer to, but to the word itself,” he adds. “The feelings involved seem to be something like disgust.”  (to read more....)

You Call That Lucky? Actually, Yes.

I’ve never really allowed myself to think about luck in my working life. I shied away from the subject because it felt belittling to my efforts to admit that some — a lot? most? — of my professional successes might have been determined by circumstances beyond my control. But a line in Nobel Prize-winning Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow got me thinking:“Luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.”

All this time, had I been wrong?

Loosely defined, luck is something that occurs accidentally or randomly and benefits one professionally or personally. The longer the odds of the particular turn or twist happening, the greater the significance we’ll assign to our sense of how “lucky” we’ve been.

Behavioral and Applied Management experts have developed mathematical formulae that attempt to quantify these slipperyvariables. But I think there are more intuitive ways for us to think about luck in our professional lives. Here’s my take:

Learn to Recognize Luck When the Universe Knocks: 
Early in my working life, an instance of luck significantly altered my career trajectory.

After graduating college as an art history major, I found work as a lowest-level-possible assistant at a big New York bank. The clerical work wasn’t remotely gratifying but — and here’s where luck enters — on the vast, 100-employee banking floor I happened to be assigned a desk directly in front of a woman who soon after went on to work for Children’s Television Workshop.

When I called my former colleague to see if she’d be willing to talk to me about her new job, she mentioned she needed a secretary — as they were still called in the late 70s — and hired me on the spot. (Professional Lucky Moment, No. 1.)

I certainly had no influence over where the bank seated me. And I was not such a go-getter that the phone call to my former colleague was inevitable. But the two combined just happened to connect me to children’s media, which turned out to be one of the consuming passions of my life.

Be Prepared to Be Lucky: 
How we chooseto think about luck in our lives is tied to whether we tend to see the world as the glass half-empty or half-full. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman offers his own formula for how professional success happens:

Success = luck + talent

Great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck

But for those of us who weren’t born with any single innate talent, here’s my personal twist on how professional success happens:

Reasonable success = luck + preparedness

(I’m not the first to have this thought. Benjamin Franklin aphorized that “diligence is the mother of good luck,” and a century later Louis Pasteur famously wrote that “chance favors only the prepared mind.“)

But learning how to put that notion into practice takes, well, practice.

I worked incredibly hard as a secretary (see Professional Lucky Moment No. 1), so when Professional Lucky Moment No. 2 happened, I was prepared. Not too long after hiring me my boss was fired, and I was able to step into important parts of her job.

What were the odds of sitting in front of a young woman at a bank in the late 1970s (there were three in the division at the time) who would leave to work in television? Not good. And the odds that person would be fired as soon as I’d learned the ropes, allowing me to move quickly up the ranks?  Approaching zero.

But in both instances I had the sense to recognize lucky moments, and, more importantly, take advantage of them.

In Great by Choice, Jim Collins explores the relationship between hard work and luck. He posits it’s discipline that increases the odds of having a return on our luck. And I couldn’t agree more.

(By the way, I’m not unique in believing a random seating assignment was one of the luckiest breaks in my career. See what Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis said about it in a commencement speech he gave at Princeton.)

Remember, What Looks Like Bad Luck Isn’t Necessarily: 
But we can’t be lucky all the time. In 1996 my husband was fired from his job as editor-in-chief of New York magazine – a stroke of spectacularly public mega-bad luck.

As my husband wandered New York, trying to envision what he might do next, his cellphone rang. The call was from a literary agent he’d met a decade earlier, demanding that 1) she represent him and 2) he write “a big book.”

And so at age 42 he became a novelist – and when that first novel was published a couple of years later, he was waiting to be interviewed on a New York public radio show, when he happened to see a job posting on a bulletin board and that job – which he landed – was creating the weekly national arts-and-culture program Studio 360 which, almost 13 years later, he is still hosting.

So, was my husband, lucky? Yes. But ask him on the day he lost his New York magazine job and he wouldn’t have said so.

And me? Yes, I count myself lucky as well. Or maybe I just know to open the door when luck comes knocking.

This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.

Joyful, Dancing Trees?

Diller, Scofidio + Renfro is an interdisciplinary design studio that integrates architecture, the visual arts, and the performing arts. The amazing work Arbores Laetae (joyful trees)  for MADE UP,  2008's Liverpool Biennial International exhibition.  I was mesmerized by the notion of "dancing" trees. Tired of the gray, slushy winter drear?  Indulge in a little seasonal time travel and lift your spirits.  Spring is just around the corner.

Feeling Stuck? Get Moving

If you're feeling trapped indoors, suit up and take a walk outdoors.  Wandering around — observing, talking to strangers, taking pictures, inhaling the rich diversity of unfamiliar life, may feel unproductive or even wasteful. But innovation needs to be informed and sometimes provoked by the unpredictable hurly-burly of messy, surprising real life. Suntae Kim, Evan Polman and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, researchers from New York University, have found that students who were allowed to walk freely, rather than along a fixed path, were able to generate 25% more creative uses for various objects.

In a recent essay, Verlyn Klinkenborg connected Charles Dickens's extraordinary creative output to his nightly walking. "He is lost in a kind of mental ventriloquism," he wrote, "calling up his emotions and studying them. Every night he walked a dozen miles, without which, he said, 'I should just explode and perish.' Under the pseudonym Boz, Dickens wrote, 'There is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy, walking through London as though 'the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.'"

In The Writing Life, author Annie Dillard knitted together stories of other walking writers.  "Wallace Stevens in his forties, living in Hartford, Connecticut, hewed to a productive routine.  He rose at six, read for two hours, and walked another hour -- three miles -- to work.  He dictated poems to his secretary.  He ate no lunch; at noon he walked for another hour, often to an art gallery.  He walked home from work -- another hour.  After dinner he retired to his study; he went to bed at nine.  On Sundays, he walked in the park....Like Stevens, Osip Mandelstam composed poetry on the hoof.  So did Dante.  Nietzsche, like Emerson, too two long walks a day.  'When my creative energy flowed most freely, my muscular activity was always greatest....I might often have been seen dancing; I used to walk through the hills for seven or eight hours on end without a hint of fatigue; I slept well, laughed a good deal -- I was perfectly vigorous and patient."

Walking, or running, as Haruki Murakami, explains in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, can be a catalyst for work.  "To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm.  This is the important thing for long-term projects.  Once you set the pace, the rest will follow."   He says, "long-distance running suits my personality, though, and of all the habits I've acquired over my lifetime I'd have to say this one has been the most helpful, the most meaningful.  Running without a break for more than two decades has also made me stronger, both physically and emotionally."

Time Travel To Downton Abbey's London

If you're a fan of Downton Abbey watch this extraordinary British film compilation of London shot in the 1920s by Claude Frisse-Greene, son of cinematographer, William Frisse-Greene. Comptine D'un Autre été L'après-midi by Yann TiersenFrom the British Film Institute http://www.bfi.org.uk/